


AKA Make It Stop

by Covert_dragon97



Category: Jessica Jones (TV), The Defenders (Marvel TV)
Genre: Blackmail, F/M, Menace, Post-Defenders, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Self-Sacrifice, some of it at least
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-19
Updated: 2018-10-08
Packaged: 2019-04-04 10:43:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,273
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14018565
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Covert_dragon97/pseuds/Covert_dragon97
Summary: Rewrite on what could have happened when Jessica found Ruben dead in her apartment.Thanks to your amazing comments and encouragement, this is no longer just a one-shot. Not really sure how far this could go, guess we'll just have to see!





	1. Chapter 1

Even the ding of the elevator makes Jessica’s head hurt. She’s sitting on the floor, drunk off her ass when Malcolm finds her.

“Well, how long have you been here?” He asks. 

Jessica looks at her neighbor, scrunching her eyebrows together as she takes in his appearance of running shorts and sweatband. “Jazzercise?”

Malcolm leans down and helps her to her feet, throwing one of her arms over his shoulder as he supports her. “Running actually helps with sobriety,” he answers.

Jessica scoffs. “Sobriety blows.”

“You’re a real inspiration,” he replies sarcastically. Pulling the sweatband from his forehead, he pushes open Jessica’s beaten and broken door. “Careful,” he warns as she stumbles in the door. He moves a black box out of her way before walking into her dirty kitchen.

Jessica leans against a wall, letting her jacket fall off and pulling off her boots.

“What you need is some electrolytes,” Malcolm’s voice says from the kitchen, “something solid in your stomach.”

Jessica continues shedding clothes as she stomps off towards her bed, her fingerless gloves falling to the floor with her boots, her sweater thrown to the floor of her bedroom before she crawls onto her bed. She lets out a sigh, finally she’ll be able to get some much deserved rest.

Her rest is short-lived, however, when seconds after lying down, she feels something wet and sticky on her sheets. Sitting up slightly, she looks down and sees the pool of red beneath her. Her panic mounts when she looks on the other side of the bed, only to find her upstairs neighbor Ruben, the weird kid with the even weirder sister, with his throat sliced open and a blood knife in still in his hands.

With a gasp, she rolls out of bed, her back crashing against the wall. She stares in horror at the dead body in her bed as she slides down the wall. Looking down, her hands are covered in his blood.

The sound of breaking glass alerts her to Malcolm’s presence as he enters the room. “Jesus Christ! Holy….Jesus Christ! He’s dead. That’s….that’s his dead body. That’s Ruben.”

Finally able to form a coherent thought, Jessica looks around her room, her gaze stopping on the bloody footprint left in her carpet. Standing up, she looks at it closer, realizing who it belongs to. “Kilgrave…” she gasps out. “He was here. He made Ruben…” Turning around, she looks back at the dead body on her bed. 

“Oh my God, poor Ruben,” Malcolm whispers. “Oh man, his poor sister. I just…”

“I can’t….I can’t...I can’t do this. I can’t. I can’t keep fighting him! I can’t fight him! I can’t do this!” Jessica shouts, clutching her stomach as if in pain, a full panic attack mounting. 

“Hey, hey,” Malcolm says as he grabs her shoulders, forcing her to look at him. “Hey, look at me. You have not killed anyone, all right? Right?” He waits for her to look at him. “Just breathe.”

“This has to stop.” Jessica pushes past him, walking back to the side of her bed.

“Yeah, you’re right,” Malcolm agrees. “You know what? We’re gunna make it stop. I’m gunna call the police right now and we’re gunna make it stop.” He fumbles around with his jacket looking for his phone.

“They’ll arrest me,” Jessica responds as Malcolm dials 911, her voice full of emotion and sorrow.

“You didn’t do it and the evidence will confirm that.”

Jessica can’t look away from Ruben’s body. “This is the third death that I’m directly connected to.” Malcolm doesn’t say anything as he slowly hangs up. Jessica reaches down and closes Ruben’s eyes. “I’m so sorry, Ruben.” Taking a breath, her voice returns to normal. “I’m gunna end it.”

Malcolm looks at her, confused. “End what? Yourself?”

“There’s another option: I go to jail.”

“What? No!” Malcolm protests.

“But it has to be the right jail,” Jessica continues, as if she’s only talking to herself. Brushing past Malcolm, she walks out of her room and stops at her desk. Opening her laptop, she starts pulling up tab after tab on Supermax prisons.

“Why the hell would you want to be locked up there?” Malcolm questions.

“Because supermax prison is a hi-tech mousetrap, and I’ll be the bait when Kilgrave comes for me.”

“If he comes for you,” Malcolm tries to point out.

“He’ll come!” Jessica spits out. “I know him.”

 

**_10 hours later_ **

Dripping water with each step, a thoroughly soaked Jessica Jones enters the police station, an equally wet plastic bag in her hand. She doesn’t slow down, doesn’t hesitate until she reaches Detective Clemons’ desk - the detective on the Schlotmann case, the man who already suspects she’s part of it all.

He doesn’t look up from his paperwork as she stops in front of him. “Yes. You’ll have to wait. Someone will be with you in a minute. Someone with yellow sneakers…”

He’s cut off as Jessica empties the contents of her plastic bag onto his desk, Ruben’s head dropping onto his paperwork. He jumps up with a starts, his hand instinctively reaching for the gun at his side. “Oh, sh…”

He freezes as he looks up and sees Jessica.

She doesn’t even flinch as guns are pointed in her direction. “I’ve done something terrible,” she says.

Half an hour later, she’s sitting in a questioning room, her hands handcuffed to the table. “God damn it! What is taking so long?” She yells to no one in particular.

Moments later, the door opens and Clemons and Jerri Hogarth, the shark of a lawyer Jessica occasionally works cases for, walk into the small room.

Jessica glares at Hogarth as she steps in. “I told you 8:00 p.m. You’re late.”

“You actually did it,” Hogarth breathes out in disbelief.

“Yes, I did.”

“You have gone off the deep end.” Addressing Clemons, who has taken a seat across from Jessica, she continues, “I want her to have a psych eval. We’ll be pleading mental incompetence.”

“What? I told you I need to go to supermax!” Jessica replies before also turning to Clemons. “I need to be in supermax. I belong there.”

“And I told you that I’m a defense attorney who does not lose cases,” Hogarth answers.

Jessica scoffs. “Oh, so you’re protecting your reputation?”

“Wendy told me what you did. Excuse me, she screamed what you did. Your judgment is severely impaired.”

Jessica turns away from her in a huff. “I waive my right to counsel.”

“No, she does not understand what she’s talking about,” Hogarth tries. “She doesn’t understand her situation.”

“I am fully cognizant of my situation. This woman does not represent me,” Jessica bites back, making sure to enunciate every word.

“I can get you a public defender,” Clemons offers.

“I’ll be representing myself in this. We’ve already wasted enough time.”

“For God’s sake, let me do my job!” Hogarth practically shouts at the same time.

Clemons jumps in and stops the argument from escalating further. “It seems like you no longer have a job, Miss Hogarth. You should leave.”

Hogarth spares Jessica one last glare before exiting the room. “You still owe me a favor, God damn it.”

“Collect it from prison!” Jessica calls back. “Jesus Christ, Clemons. I brought you my victim’s head, and now I’m confessing. Open and shut.”

“Is it?” He questions.

“I’m sick. I’m dangerous and I belong in supermax!”

“Supermax? Not jail?”

“I’m a top-shelf pervert,” Jessica replies slowly, almost as if it’s hard for her to say it. 

Clemons still doesn’t seem to believe her. “Last time we talked, you were just trying to make a goddamn living.”

“Last time we talked,  _ you _ were suspicious of me. You thought that I was hiding something and you were right. And now I’m tired of hiding.”

Clemons throws up his hands in question. “So you’ve come to me to…?”

“Expedite my incarceration. I just want...to rest.” When he still doesn’t seem convinced, she tries a new approach. “Clemons, you’re two years away from retiring. Call this an easy collar and just put me away.”

With a sign, he folds his hands on the table. “Why’d you kill him?”

Jessica looks slightly taken aback by the question, but recovers quickly. “Because that’s what I do. I’m a killer....and a sociopath.”

“You never killed before,” he supplies.

“I’ve never been caught,” Jessica retorts. “There is a power inside me...and it just takes over. Supermax is the only place strong enough to hold me. That guy’s head?” she points out, referring to Ruben, “I tore it off with my bare hands.”

“That takes a lot of strength. And a hacksaw.”

Jessica shakes her head, her will power crumbling at his refusal to accept her story. “Unbelievable,” she mutters before standing up.

“Miss Jones, sit down!” Clemons commands.

Jessica ignores him and breaks the handcuffs off with ease. Picking up the metal chair she had previously been sitting in, she begins to bend it in half. “You are wasting time!” She continues to bend the legs in before tossing the ruined chair into the wall, scaring the poor detective. “Put me in supermax!”

Clemons holds his hands out in front of him in an attempt to get her to calm down. “Stop...”

He’s interrupted when the door opens and an officer comes in. “Jessica Jones, you’re free to go,” the officer says as he unlocks what was left of the handcuffs on her wrists.

“Mahoney, what are you doing?” Clemons’ questions him.

Jessica stares at the officer in disbelief as he replies, “Captain’s orders.” Motioning towards the door, he says, “Go, now.”

Jessica continues to look back and forth between Clemons and the officer in confusion. “I told you Hogarth does not represent me. I’m going to kick her Armani covered ass!” She practically shouts as she stomps out of the interrogation room and back towards the office area. “Hogarth! I told you to…” Her sentence dies as she takes in the scene in front of her. 

All of the cops are either holding guns to their own heads or pointing them at another officer. Jessica freezes in shock, her rate rate climbing and her breathing coming in short breaths.. Clemons comes walking up soon after. “What the hell is going on here?” He asks. When no one replies, he orders, “Drop your weapons!”

The other officer from the interrogation room, Mahoney, lifts his gun and points it at Clemons head, who turns around surprised to see his friend pointing a gun at him. “Brett?”

“Shut up. Don’t move,” Mahoney commands.

“Oh, everyone, calm down. You’re killing the mood,” comes a somewhat whiney British voice, the same voice that haunted Jessica’s every moment.

Glancing over, she sees him, leaning against a cubicle, dressed in one of his typical purple suits. “Jessica,” he purrs, a smile on his face as he looks at her.

Jessica freezes. It’s her worst nightmare come true. He ignores her obvious panic. “You’re not surprised to see me,” he states. “You had to know I’d come for you. Not this fast...” He begins swaggering towards Jessica. “I...I will admit to keeping eyes on you. Spies are easy to come by, for me,” he motions to a frozen officer to illustrate his point.

Jessica takes a deep breath. “Do whatever you’re going to do to me, but let them go.”

Kilgrave continues walking towards her, spinning for one final look around before stopping a few feet away from her. “Well, I have to protect myself, so…”

“Then control me, not them.”

Looking down at his feet and shoving his hands in his pockets, he replies, “I have absolutely no intention of controlling you. I want you to act on your own accord.”

Jessica just stares at him, disbelief written all over her face. “Act how?” She enunciates. “Suicide? Is that why you’ve been torturing me?” 

The smug expression on his face melts away and one of amused concern takes its place as he lets out a chuckle. “Oh my God! Jessica, I knew you were insecure, but that’s just sad. I’m not torturing you...why would I?” His voice sounds genuine as he takes a few steps closer to her until he’s within arm’s reach. “I love you.”

Jessica just stares back at him, trying to convince herself this is all just one horrible nightmare. Taking a half step back, she finally forms words. “You have been ruining my life.”

His smug expression returns in an instant. “You didn’t have a life,” he scoffs. 

Jessica ignores his comment and continues, “As a demented declaration of love?”

“No,” Kilgrave stammers, “obviously. I..I was trying to show you what I see.” He takes several steps back, finally noticing the panicked expression in her eyes. “That I’m the only one who matches you. Who challenges you. Who will do anything for you.” He looks at her intently, trying to express his sincerity. 

Jessica’s breathing picks up again. “This is a sick joke. You have killed innocent people.”

Kilgrave looks at her, confused for a moment, before realization dawns. “Oh, what? That milk-toast little man boy? He interrupted me as I was leaving you a present, which evidently you didn’t even find.” He sighs, taking a step closer to Jessica again. “Come on! You can’t pretend he didn’t irritate you too! I wanted to slap him after thirty seconds.” He takes the next few steps towards her, completely in her space now. “I know,” he whispers, “I realize this will take time.” With a deep breath, he looks back to her face. “But I’m going to prove it to you.”

Before he can say anything else, a phone rings, cutting through the silence. Jessica recognizes the annoyed expression that comes over the man in front of her. “Who’s is that?” He questions as it continues to ring. “Who’s phone is that!”

Jessica shifts her weight from one foot to another, terrified of what he’ll do next, instinctively not meeting his gaze as he looks around for the culprit responsible for the ringing phone. 

His eyes finally land on Clemons. With a false sense of calm, he walks up to the detective, pulling the offending phone from his jacket pocket before throwing it into the wall behind the detective. “Next person who’s phone rings has to eat it!” Kilgrave shouts. He begins pacing back and forth in front of Jessica, muttering, “Crappy fluorescent lights, cockroaches, loud cell phones, and the smell of piss…” He grabs a stack of papers and flings it across the room in anger. “I am trying to confess eternal love here people!” He shouts.

Jessica can’t take it anymore. She knows what’s bound to happen next, and can’t watch someone else die because of her. “I’ll come with you,” she says with a step towards him. 

His attention shifts back to her. “To protect them, not out of choice.”

“Just please, I can’t...I can’t keep doing this,” Jessica practically pleads. “What’s next, I find my landlady choked out in my bathtub? I find a neighbor bludgeoned to death with my vacuum cleaner? I just want it to stop. I’m here now, you’ve got me.”

He smiles as he nods his head. “No, no I don’t. Not really. I want you to choose me, just like I’ve chosen you.”

“Then yes, I choose you. I’m yours. Just make it stop!” Jessica can feel her emotions boiling over, her voice thick and her eyes brimming with tears she’s trying desperately to hold back.

“Oh, Jessica,” Kilgrave purrs, stepping back into her space. “I don’t believe you.”

Her breathing picks up as she glances up at the ceiling, blinking back tears that threatened to fall. “What more do you want from me?” Jessica asks, her voice breaking. 

“Prove it to me,” he whispers in her ear. 

Jessica looks at his face in confusion, before finally realizing what he wants. Wiping her eyes with the back of her hand, she closes the gap between them, her lips meeting his in a quick kiss. One of his hands moves to cup the side of her face, the other rests softly on her waist. She tenses at his touch, using all of her strength not to flinch away. 

The kiss only lasted a few seconds, but before she could pull away to safety, he grinned evilly. “Come on now, Jessica. Be more convincing than that,” he whispered against her lips. “You wouldn’t want one of these guns to accidentally go off, would you?”

And with that sentence, she realized she’d sold her soul to the devil.


	2. Chapter 2

_ “Jessica, why do you never smile unless I tell you to?” Kilgrave whined, propped up on one elbow facing her in their lavish hotel bed. Jessica had only been awake for ten minutes and already he needed something from her. _

_ “Because I don’t like to,” she replied, his powers forcing the truth out of her.  _

_ Kilgrave looked slightly put out. “But darling, I love it when you smile.” _

_ Jessica chose not to respond, biting back the sarcastic “which is why I don’t like it” comment that threatened to spill out. _

_ “What if I could make you smile without telling you to?” her captor suggested with a raised eyebrow. _

_ Confusion crossed Jessica’s features, unsure where this conversation was going. Very rarely had he ever let her act on her own free will, and the incredibly rare times he did had only been deals struck to prevent some other poor soul from suffering at his hand.  _

_ Kilgrave’s face had a playful look on it, which left a bad feeling in Jessica’s gut. When he felt playful, it usually meant staying in the hotel room, or more specifically, the bedroom. And if she didn’t play along like he wanted, it usually didn’t end well for her. _

_ “What did you have in mind?” She asked tentatively.  _

_ Kilgrave smirked down at her before he stands up and moved to the edge of the bed. “I want you to spread yourself out, with your arms above your head, as far as you can go.” _

_ Try as she might to fight her own body, Jessica’s limbs moved against her will to the corners of the large bed.  _

_ “Now, no matter what, I don’t want you to move. Stay exactly as you are,” he said, looking down at her with an almost evil gleam in his eyes. “But feel free to talk and make whatever noise you want. You know how I love your voice, Jessica.” _

_ Her body suppressed the shudder that she should have felt, obeying his command to not move.  _

_ “What are you going to do?” Jessica asked, hating how small her voice sounded. But she thought she already knew what he was going to do - the same thing he did to her body every day. _

_ “I already told you: I’m going to make you smile without telling you to.” He looked down at her naked body as if taking it all in for the first time. “Jesus, you’re a vision,” he breathed. After a few more seconds of tracing his eyes over her body, he looked back at her face. “Tell me, Jessica, did your parents ever play with you when you were a child?” _

_ Jessica was completely confused now, utterly unsure of whatever sadistic plan he was enacting. “Yes, of course they did.” _

_ “And what different ways did they play with you? Specifically the ones that made you smile.” _

_ “My mom used to play stupid kid card games with me and let me win on purpose. My dad played hide and seek with me and always picked the stupidest places to hide so I’d find him.” Jessica can feel the lump in her throat start to form at being forced to remember happy times with the family that she lost - that she got killed.  _

_ “Yes, keep going,” Kilgrave prompted. _

_ Swallowing the lump, she did as he ordered. “I used to chase Phil around with a water gun in the summer until one of us ran out of water. My dad used to wrestle around with me, sometimes tickling me until I said ‘uncle.’” Realization suddenly dawned on her as his face suddenly twisted into an almost wolfish smile. _

_ Kilgrave kneeled on the edge of the bed, moving closer until he was seated between her legs. “Now, let’s find that smile.” _

Jessica startled awake in a cold sweat, breathing hard. “Shit,” she mumbled to herself as she ran a hand through her hair. “I need a drink.” 

She found a half empty bottle of whisky on her desk and took a large gulp. He was dead. She’d put him out of her misery. So then why wouldn’t this feeling of dread go away. Maybe it was just left over guilt, she tried to reason. Guilt over Matt Murdock’s death. 

“Some hero,” she scoffed, followed by another drink from the bottle. She didn’t tell Trish that the nightmares had come back. Her sister would probably just blame the goddamn PTSD. But Jessica hadn’t seen the body be cremated - she’d only seen the medics zip up the body bag and take him away. The Hand brought Devil Boy’s dead girlfriend back, who says they didn’t do the same to Kilgrave?

With a sigh, she realized she had finished her last bottle. Slipping on her jacket and boots, she headed out of her apartment into the chilly New York night.

 

After buying several of the cheapest bottles of whiskey she could get, she ends up at the last place she’d ever thought she’d go again. The docks. The docks where Kilgrave had ordered all those police officers to shoot her. The docks where he had made all those people fight each other. The docks where he had almost taken Trish away from her. The docks where she snapped his neck.

She plopped down against a wall, looking out on the black water and popping the cap off of her third bottle of the night. Booze always made her thoughts easier to deal with. After sitting in silence for almost half an hour and most of the bottle, she leaned her head back against the wall and let out a pained laugh. “What the hell am I doing here?”

“Looking for me I assume,” a smooth voice answered from the darkness around her.

Jessica immediately snapped up, her head swiveling around. The buzz in her head made her vision slightly blurry, making it too hard to make out anyone. She waited for something to happen, but nothing did.

“Goddamn PTSD,” she muttered before taking another long drink.

“You always did have a wild imagination,” the voice said again.

“Yeah, well this is the first time I’ve talked back to it,” she replied. “Normally getting drunk makes it all go away.”

“The mighty Jessica Jones, scared of her own thoughts,” the voice taunts.

“When your life is as full of shit as mine, you gotta find ways to cope.”

“What, you don’t regret killing me, do you?”

Jessica looks back into the darkness, trying to make out anything or anyone lurking there. “I never wanted to be a killer - never wanted to be like you. But that’s what you do, isn’t it? You make people your puppets and make them do what you want. You wanted me to be more like you? Well, here you go.” Closing her eyes, she leaned her head back against the wall behind her. “It was the only way to save Trish, so no, I don’t regret it.”

“Do you miss me?” His voice sounded closer than before, but Jessica just assumed it was the booze making her head fuzzy.

“How can I miss him when my own shit thoughts never let me stop thinking about everything he did to me?”

He let out a short laugh. “I always missed you. It didn’t all turn out the way I planned it, I’ll admit, at least not after you abducted me and threw me in that cell.”

“Yeah, well, you got to play house with me for too long, isn’t that enough?”

The voice kept getting closer. “I don’t think I could ever be satisfied with only a few weeks with you. But having you stay there of your own volition, that was a pleasure I had never experienced before. Too bad you had to ruin it all.”

“Yeah, too bad I didn’t want to live in your freakish barbie house with slaves held ransom so I’d do what you want. Just because I was immune to you, doesn’t mean they were.”

“I can’t help my power, you know that. It’s already difficult to choose the right words. And you have to admit, playing superheroes with me was fun.”

A tiny smile formed on Jessica’s lips. “It wasn’t horrible getting to tell you what to do for a change.”

He gasped. “Is that a smile, Jessica? I always told you I could make you smile without ordering you too.”

The nightmare she had earlier came back to her, her smile instantly turning into a frown. “Yeah, through some other sadistic method.” She could almost feel the heat of him sitting next to her, but she refused to open her eyes and look.  _ I’m just drunk and hallucinating again, _ she reasoned.

“I hope you won’t try to kill me this time around,” he says next to her.

“Yeah, asshole, keep thinking that.”

“I’ll see you soon, Jessica,” he says.

Jessica’s eyes snap open as she hears footsteps walking away, and she can vaguely make out a man’s outline as the blurry purple figure walks away.

“Shit.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Did you miss me?  
> What's Kilgrave going to do this time around?  
> No idea when I'll be able to post next, but your comments inspire me to write!


End file.
